 Welcome back to my YouTube channel Daniel Rosal here. For today's video, I want to talk about the differences, the pros and cons between desktop based video editor and cloud video editors. Now, what is firstly a cloud video editor? So I just did a review of an interesting cloud video editor, and that was what actually gave me the idea to make this video. There's some like Flixie, for example, they've been on the market for a number of years now, and the easiest way to understand it if you haven't heard about them. It's basically SAS software as a service. The software is delivered through a online subscription that's accessed via a web browser. Now, if you want an analogy, think about checking your email via one of those old school email clients versus simply logging on to Gmail or creating a document as a Google doc in your Google account versus doing it using Microsoft Word or LibreOffice or whatever else takes your fancy. So that's the difference. When we're talking about online video editors, we're talking about video editors that are delivered in the cloud. The software is loaded into a cloud computer that you can access via your web browser. You don't have to actually install any software on your local computer. All you need is a web browser to log in and access it. Now, if I were to take a guess, I don't have any numbers specifically to back this up, but if I were to guess the percentage of professional video editors who are using one of these cloud video editing platforms for their day-to-day usage versus using industry standard video editors such as DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere or even the open source equivalent of Caden Live, I don't really think it's happening. I think it must be a vanishingly small minority. Now, the reason I think that these SaaS video editors haven't become default even among more casual video creators is probably got to do with the fact that they have a bit of a constraint regarding bandwidth. Because if we're doing something like uploading a document to the cloud or working on a cloud document, we're typing away to our computer and we're uploading tiny, tiny amounts of data to the cloud. So when you work on a Word document in something like Google as a Google doc, it's a pretty seamless experience for the end users. There's no real latency. You just see your doc being created. Now, the problem with video is that video as a file is just a lot heavier than text, right? Even a video file of a few seconds could be 20 or 30 megabytes depending on the codec you're using and depending on the quality. So therefore, if you don't have a really, really good internet connection, you're going to have to get your files up to the cloud somewhere, right? When you begin working on a video project, typically whatever video editor you're using, the first thing people do is load files from their camera, import them to their computer and point to a folder on their video editor saying, this is the folder I'm working with for this video project. Now, you might have 10 or 20 gigabytes worth of video in that folder. Now, that's great, but if we want to do the same process in a cloud video editor, we're going to have to upload that 20 gigabytes of data to the cloud, right? The data, those videos is not magically going to jump from your office to wherever the cloud video editor is being hosted and make itself available. So that's why I personally haven't used them as much as I would like to because my internet upload speed is slow, but there are still a lot of people out there with pretty asymmetrical internet connections and it's just not really a runner to be able to use cloud video platforms for this purpose, for this reason. Now, the advantages of a cloud video editing platforms, they're terrific for collaboration and for mobility, right? If you use a cloud video editing workflow and you upload your raw clip library to the cloud, you work on the timeline, you make your edit, it can be basically like working on a Google doc with three or four collaborators. You can be all logged in to this video editor, making tweaks to the timeline from different accounts. It also means of course that because your video project lives in the cloud rather than your computer, it's really easy to access it from literally any computer that has an internet connection on the world. You can start working on it from your office, you can take a flight to a different city and continue where you left off and there's one final advantage of cloud video editing platforms and that's again got to do with the fact that they live in the cloud. Because they live in the cloud, publishing to other clouds tends to be very easy, so it's very, very common. In fact, I haven't yet seen a video, an online video editor that doesn't have an integration with YouTube. Now the reason that cloud to cloud publishing tends to be quick is that these cloud video editors are provisioned on computers that are basically have much better internet connections than your average home user. So moving from that computer up to YouTube tends to be much more quick than moving from your computer. One final big advantage is that when you are working on cloud video editing platforms, you are running, you're doing your video editing on a computer that is somewhere else in the world. What that means is that cloud, because of the economies of scale that are realized when cloud computing happens, whether we're talking about document editing or anything else, those cloud video platforms can give users access to much more powerful machines than they might have available themselves. If you're working in something like 4k video or even 6k or 8k video, dealing with that kind of file size and rendering that can require a lot of compute power or GPU power versus when you're using something in the cloud, you can take a really, really old laptop and be able to actually do the video editing, do the video rendering on a supercomputer, because you're not actually working on the computer in your studio or in your office. That's just kind of a front end to the actual computer you're doing the video editing on. Now by contrast, the con of cloud video editing, well, you're basically putting up, putting all your video editing projects into the hands of someone else's product that you're going to have to pay for to retain access. Now this isn't a disadvantage of just cloud video editing platform, it's a disadvantage of cloud computing. Generally, there's a loss of control inherent in putting your stuff up to the cloud and you have to really hope that the cloud provider is trustworthy and doesn't lose your data or you might find that the price has changed and you can't afford it anymore. So that's called vendor lock. So there's definitely significant disadvantages as well. I thought I would put together this quadrant if you're looking for more detail on which is better in which circumstance. Now the very kind of top level advice I would give to someone as well. If you're looking for, if you need advanced video editing features, you need speed ramping, you need excellent color grading, you need advanced audio waveform, you know, spectrography and editing, you probably be better off right now using a traditional offline desktop video editor. I've yet to see a cloud video editor that gave a desktop program a run for its money or that I did it in terms of features. They tend to be simplified, pared down versions of desktop video editors. However, if you're a more casual video creator and editor, you're just looking to create some vertical video clips for distribution on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn. One of these online video editors that makes it very simple, that hooks into a stop library and you can publish to YouTube at the click of a button without having any files on your computer, that may actually be a much better fit for you. So it really, really depends on today, what kind of video you're creating, what your use case is, tomorrow or in 10 years time, we might find that the online video editors have matured to the point that you can create Hollywood movies on them. We're not just there yet. Now, just to kind of recap on the pros and cons for offline or desktop video editors, the pros are that they are rich in features. They can stuff a lot of features and not worry about how quickly the features and the menus are going to load because it's all running on your local computer. So today for feature, if you're really concerned about feature richness and getting the cutting edge video editing features you need, desktop software remains the way to go. One other advantage here is that there is none of the online editing software so far have got enough traction in the video editing market that they can be kind of an advantage. I've never seen someone put on their resume, oh, I know how to edit in flixier, right? It just doesn't happen. Whereas knowing DaVinci or knowing Premiere and even getting certified in it, I'm not sure there is such a thing as certification. Maybe there is, but you know what I mean, it's a skill, it's an industry standard that you can carry around with you to different employers, etc. You're not going to have that if all you know is how to use a cloud editor. Now the cons of offline desktop video editors, collaboration is harder. It's really easy to collaborate in the cloud because your data is being stored in a central always online point. That's basically the advantage of cloud computing and that's a lot harder. It's not that you can't collaborate if you're working in a desktop environment. You can and local editing workflows where the projects you stored on NASs are very commonplace. It's just more complicated than just saying, okay, we all need to sign up for accounts on our cloud editor and we can just log in. Learning curve can be steep for these offline editors because they're more powerful machines and local storage can be a constraint. Don't forget that one of the advantages of cloud video editing and cloud computing generally is you're storing stuff in the cloud. So you don't need to worry about how much disk capacity you have versus if you're doing it in the cloud really depends how much they give you, but you can upgrade because the infrastructure required to do video editing is being professionally managed in the cloud. Again, these aren't video specific. These are just general cloud computing advantages and they apply also in the case of video. Now if we look at cloud or SaaS video editors to wrap this up, the pros and the cons, pros are it's super convenient, right? It's like a Google docs style thing. You just log in and edit your timeline and publish to the cloud. Very, very easy. Collaboration is easy as I mentioned. And finally, as I mentioned, we have cloud to cloud integrations are possible because you're editing in the cloud. So you can get super fast rendering because you're editing on a super computer and you can get super fast cloud publishing because you're editing in the cloud to significant advantages. Cons, your upload speed can be a deal breaker, right? As I mentioned, my upload speed is bad. So I basically have done a few test projects on these cloud editors. I was very happy with the editing capabilities, but it's just not a runner for me because it would take way too long for me to upload all my raw clip libraries I do on every shoot to the cloud. Finally, as I mentioned, you've got ongoing SaaS charge and a lot of control. Again, not specific to this, but definitely something that might be a deal breaker for even organizations. You have data governance policies that say we need our data, whether it's video data or client documentation to live in servers we control or that are in this jurisdiction. And when you're editing, when you're doing stuff in the cloud, you're giving your data up to a third party, you lose that control for sure. Hope this comparison is useful. I do think they both have their place. And my big prediction, of course, is that we're going to see these online cloud video editors really, really get a lot better as bandwidth continues to improve around the world. It's going to become more viable and more attractive for folks to do their video editing in the cloud rather than on their local computers. Thank you guys for watching. Hope this video was informative. If you do want to get more videos from me about tech and other subjects, do please consider subscribing to this YouTube channel. Thank you for watching.